While awaiting sentencing, Friedland disappeared in September 1985 by faking his death in a supposed drowning incident off Grand Bahama.
He was one of the U.S. government's most wanted fugitives until his capture in the Maldives in 1987, where he drew attention to himself after creating a successful chain of scuba diving shops.
In the wake of the 1964 decision by the Supreme Court of the United States in Reynolds v. Sims, establishing the one man, one vote principle that state legislative districts must be approximately equal in population, Friedland filed suit in New Jersey Supreme Court on behalf of Christopher Jackman of the Laundry Workers Union and Winfield Chasmar, Jr. of the Paper Box Workers Union, challenging a system under which each county was represented by a single member in the New Jersey Senate.
Brennan's testimony was based on New Jersey State Police files which alleged that Friedland had acted as the middleman to suppress criminal complaints against a loan shark.
Friedland denied Brennan's allegations and demanded his resignation, stating that he had been attempting to settle a usurious loan and that he had not talked to any of the complaining witnesses.
The four defections denied Woodson a chance to become the first African American Speaker in the history of the General Assembly, leading to charges that the dissidents were racially motivated.
[12] In 1982, he reached an agreement with the United States Attorney's office in Newark, New Jersey under which he would avoid prison in exchange for his assistance in recording incriminating conversations with his former associates.
[citation needed] While in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program he took a job with a mortgage firm owned by Joseph J. Higgins, a former member of the New Jersey General Assembly, and they made additional efforts to defraud the same pension fund.
[citation needed] In 1983, United States Attorney for New Jersey W. Hunt Dumont was reported by The New York Times to be pursuing a major investigation of as many as 50 individuals based on evidence that Friedland had provided.
During his time on the lam, he had been traced to Kenya, Paris, Venice, Hong Kong and Singapore and worked his way up to become the number one fugitive wanted by the United States Marshals Service.
In December 1987, two years after his disappearance, he was arrested by officials in Malé, capital of Maldives, an island country in the Indian Ocean, where he had been working as a scuba dive master.
While in the Maldives, Friedland did little to avoid attention, including posing for a post card in which he was in scuba gear feeding a live shark with food held in his own mouth.
[5] Friedland was flown back to the United States, arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport on December 28, 1987, under the custody of the U.S.
[17] In a January 1988 hearing prior to Friedland's trial for conspiracy to defraud the union pension fund, then-First United States Attorney Michael Chertoff told judge John F. Gerry that, while he was in the Maldives, Friedland had contacted Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi as part of an effort to arrange "asylum in Libya or any anti-American country".